Sammy Greenwall and Adam Pratt Launch Henry, an AI Tool To Create Broker Deal Decks
By Cathy Cunningham June 19, 2024 8:00 am
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In the brokerage world, time is money — and a new platform was just launched to help brokers take back some of their precious minutes.
Sammy Greenwall, who co-founded Lev in September 2019, has launched his own firm, Henry, alongside Adam Pratt, Commercial Observer can first report.
Plainly put, Henry is an artificial intelligence (AI) “co-pilot” who builds deal decks for commercial real estate brokers.
“Investment sales brokers are spending three, four hours a days building presentations, whether it’s putting together a broker opinion of value, an offering memorandum or anything else, they’re wasting time they could be spending originating or building relationships,” said Greenwall, who underscores that Henry isn’t just a way to cut operating expenses but rather a tool for maximizing top-line revenue generation. “Brokers are here to stay, and we want to empower them to be better and originate more. Relationships are the driver of deals, and we want to allow those brokers to do more deals.”
Henry launches today, during a time of slowly increasing market activity after the market dislocation sparked by rising interest rates over the past two years. The evolution of AI has played a significant role in the timing, and in Henry’s capabilities.
“It wasn’t possible to build bespoke, customized deal decks with the extensive details around the financial modeling, market summaries and comps generation before the advent of large language models [like ChatGPT],” Greenwall said. “That’s why we think it’s an exciting time now.”
So far, three brokerages — who couldn’t be named for confidentiality reasons — have been onboarded to Henry’s pilot program.
“I started this business May 7, so we’ve seen this traction within 45 days,” Greenwall said “If we can deliver this right, it’s going to be a game-changer for the industry.”
Every CRE firm, team and deal is different, and so Henry will have its work cut out producing bespoke decks to meet all of its clients’ requirements. “The first thing is understanding all the different types of deals that a brokerage works on, the different types of decks that they would have for each specific use case, and the different financial models they use,” Greenwall said.
Once the Henry team has an understanding of the above factors, they map this information to Henry who then builds a deck based on what’s been delivered.
“Effectively, at that point, all they need to do is upload a T12 report [trailing 12 months of income and expenses], a rent roll, and photos if they want.”
The day-to-day time suck of compiling decks is the big impetus behind Henry’s launch. “It takes so long to put together this information,” Greenwall said. “You have huge operating expenses, because you have to hire a marketing team, you have to have an analyst, and that takes away from your top line. The speed that you can get these decks out with Henry will actually allow you to generate more revenue.”
In case you were wondering, the platform is named after a person.
“The best real estate analyst that I ever knew in the business was named Henry,” Greenwall said, declining to give the namesake’s full name. “He made no mistakes, he got the OMs done very quickly, and he had the best underwriting models.”
And, in a way, Henry the platform is designed to act like that high-performing person on your team.
“Previously, it was very clear that ‘I’m a person, and this is software,’ but now with generative AI, and how far we’ve come, this has changed,” Greenwall said. “This software should feel like you have an assistant that’s available 24 hours a day. They know how you talk, they know how you speak, they know how you want to present things, and they know how you edit things. They know what kind of work you need to get done and how to prioritize.”
The platform may just be launching today, but Greenwall has a long-term vision for Henry. “It’s not just an OM presenter, it’s an end-to-end workflow solution for commercial real estate brokers and professionals,” he said. “We want to own the entire stack, full stop.
“I want to be very clear, I don’t think brokers are going anywhere,” Greenwall reiterated. “Brokers are here to stay, and I feel very strongly about that. That’s why I’m building software for them.”
Greenwall grew up with Adam Pratt, Henry’s other co-founder and chief technology officer. In 2018, while in college, Pratt sold his company Halligan to Vector Solutions for $3.2 million. Most recently, he managed a 27-person engineering team at ZocDoc.
The team is off to the races after recently being accepted into Y Combinator, a startup accelerator and venture capital firm that’s launched a slew of companies including Airbnb, Doordash, Instacart and Dropbox. Greenwall and Pratt were invited to interview with Y Combinator by their lead investor, David Lieb, who is also the creator of Google Photos and the Bump app.
“It’s the most prestigious accelerator in the world, so we’re really excited about that,” Greenwall said. “We’re actually going to be moving to San Francisco next week to participate in a combinator. The idea is, you go through the program for about three months, and at the end of the program you raise your seed round.”
The platform has also raised hundreds of thousands outside of Y Combinator from angel investors and founders.
“It’s only been 45 days, and we’ve done a lot,” Greenwall said. “Getting the team set up, getting into Y Combinator and raising almost $1 million already shows that there’s real demand for this, and I’m really excited about it.”
Cathy Cunningham can be reached at ccunningham@commercialobserver.com
